Their
courtship was void of fondness, and their lamentation of sorrow. Their
wish was only to say what they hoped had never been said before.
Nor was the sublime more within their reach than the pathetic; for
they never attempted that comprehension and expanse of thought which
at once fills the whole mind, and of which the first effect is sudden
astonishment, and the second rational admiration. Sublimity is produced
by aggregation, and littleness by dispersion. Great thoughts are always
general, and consist in positions not limited by exceptions, and in
descriptions not descending to minuteness. It is with great propriety
that subtlety, which in its original import means exility of particles,
is taken in its metaphorical meaning for nicety of distinction. Those
writers who lay on the watch for novelty could have little hope of
greatness; for great things cannot have escaped former observation.
Their attempts were always analytic; they broke every image into
fragments: and could no more represent, by their slender conceits and
laboured particularities, the prospects of nature or the scenes of
life, than he who dissects a sunbeam with a prism can exhibit the wide
effulgence of a summer noon.
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